Matthew Snelgrove read his evening copy of The Bellman with a special gloomy relish, for it never failed to yield several instances in which rampant democracy had been guilty of some foolishness which could never, he was convinced, have happened under the old squirearchy—particularly if a sufficient number of squires happened also to be lawyers. Life, as he conceived of it, was a long decline from a glorious past, and if a reader approaches a newspaper in that spirit, he can find much to confirm him in his belief, particularly if he has never examined any short period of the past in day-to-day detail. Bleak also in her approach to The Bellman was Mrs Solomon Bridgetower, the mother of that Solomon Bridgetower whose name had been unwarrantably linked with that of Pearl Vambrace. She was a lady whose life had been devoted in great part to the study of world politics; when she was a young and keen-witted undergraduate of Waverley she had explored and dreaded the Yellow Peril with an intensity which was beyond her years, and won the admiration of her professors. As a young wife during the First World War she had been a great expert on German atrocities; she had successively foreseen and dreaded the Jazz Age, the Depression, the Rise of Fascism and the Second World War, but she had always had a soft spot for her first dread, the Yellow Peril, and insisted on regarding the rise of Russia to world power as an aspect of it. Higher education and a naturally acute mind had enabled her to dread all these things much more comprehensively and learnedly than most ladies of her acquaintance, and had won her a local reputation as a woman of capacious intellect. She read her Bellman with a special pair of scissors at her side, so that she might cut out and keep any particularly significant and doom-filled piece of news.

The only other reader of the Salterton paper who used scissors was the secretary to the archbishop of the Roman Catholic diocese which had its cathedral there. Unknown to each other as they were, Monsignor Caffrey and Mrs Bridgetower had both read and been impressed by a book written in the ‘twenties by a French abbé, who recommended the clipping of newspapers as a method of clarifying and understanding what appeared in them. But while he did not use scissors, Gloster Ridley made it his nightly duty to read The Bellman, using a blue pencil to mark every error of spelling, punctuation, proof-reading and grammar; from time to time he confronted his staff with these marked papers, as a means of urging them toward the perfection which danced before him, an ever-fleeting goal.

There was one other paper-marker in Salterton, and that was Mrs Edith Little, Ridley’s housekeeper, and it was this habit of hers which made him think of her as Constant Reader.

“Come on there, Ede, come on! Let some of the rest of us have a look at the paper!” It was Mrs Little’s brother-in-law, George Morphew, who spoke, and he playfully punched the November 1st issue of The Bellman from behind, as he did so, startling her from her absorption.

“You can have it in a few minutes,” she said, with dignity. “Just be patient.”

“Patient, hell! I got to check up on my investments.” George laughed loudly.

“Oh, your investments! You’re more of a baby than Earl. And speaking of Earl, just mind your language, George.”

“He’s in bed.”

“But not asleep. He can hear everything. And he just picks up everything he hears. So just let’s have a little less of H and D, please.”

George’s reply was to belch, long and pleasurably. His sister-in-law gave him a sharp glance, and although his face was solemn, she knew that he was kidding her. George thought of himself as a great kidder. Pity there was such a coarse streak in George. Still, that was how it was with most men; swear or burp or even worse, and think themselves funny. She went on with her painstaking reading of the paper; from time to time she wetted her pencil and marked a typographical error. It was not long until her sister came in. George caught his wife by the wrist and drew her down into his lap. He kissed her with relish, while she struggled and giggled in his arms.

“Cut it out, Georgie,” she cried.

“A fine thing!” said George, feigning dismay. “A fellow comes home after five days on the road, and he can’t even get a little smooch!”

“Not in front of Ede,” said his wife.

“Gripes! Can’t swear because of Earl; can’t give you a smooching because of Ede! What the heck kind of house is this anyway?”

“Don’t mind me,” said Edith, but she was blushing.

“Lookit, Ede’s blushing!” cried George, delighted. “Come on, Kitten, let’s show her a real burner, and she’ll go up in smoke!” He seized his wife again, and kissed her in what he believed to be a Hollywood manner.

“George, that’s enough!” said Kitten. “You got to remember that Ede’s living a single life, and that kind of thing isn’t fair to her. She’s got her feelings, you know.”

“OK, OK,” said George, with assumed docility, and as his wife sat on his lap rearranging her hair, he whistled When I Get You Alone Tonight, rolling his eyes in rapture. This caused Kitten to give him a playful punch in the chest, to which he responded by slipping his hand under her skirt and snapping her garter against her thigh. Edith sniffed and glowered at the paper. These nights when George came home from “the road” were always difficult. She wondered how Kitten could stand for it. Funny how some people seemed to lose all the refinement they’d been brought up with, after marriage. These thoughts of hers were well understood by her sister, who thought that what Ede needed, maybe, was a little cheering up. Nothing raw, like George wanted to pull, but some fun.

“Ede’s marking up the paper for her fella,” said she, winking at her husband.

“Oh, that’s it, eh?” said George. “Say, how’s the big romance coming along, Ede?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” said Mrs Little, blushing again.

“Go on! Sure you have. You and Mr Shakespeare Ridley. Have you named the day?”

“Things between Mr Ridley and I are just exactly what they’ve always been, to wit, strictly formal as between employer and daily homemaker.”

“Strictly formal, eh? Like the time he was sick and asked you to give him a bed-bath?” said George.

“George Morphew, you made that up out of whole cloth, and I’d just like you to understand I don’t like it!”

“Well, cripes, Ede, keep your shirt on! Cripes, it’s nothing to me if you give him a bath. For all of me you can get into the tub together,” said George, who delighted in this subtle baiting of his sister-in-law and was prepared to continue on these lines for an hour. But Mrs Little’s cheeks were very red, and there were tears in her eyes.

“I’d just like you to know, George, that I’m a part owner in this house and I don’t have to put up with that kind of talk,” said she. “And if there’s any more of it, I’ll march right out of here with Earl, and you can carry the whole thing, mortgage and all.”

“Now you’ve made her sore, George,” said Kitten. “Why do you always have to go so far? Can’t you ever kid without getting raw? Lookit, now you’ve got her bawling.” She went to her sister and set about those shoulder squeezings, proffering of bits of partly-used Kleenex, and murmurings, with which women comfort one another.

“OK, OK, you don’t have to take that line with me,” said George who, like many great kidders, quickly became aggrieved. “I know we’ve got a mortgage just as well as anybody else in this house, and if you don’t want Earl to know it too, you better not shout so loud. You don’t have to throw the mortgage up in my face, just when I get home from five days on the road.”

“When you get back from the road, all you want to think about is One Thing,” said Mrs Little, with an air of injured virtue.